NORMAL TOWN POET
The Other Side of The Desk (The Ugly Librarian) In my middle years (not young not old) I spent many hours in serviceOn the shiny oak desks of municipal and academic librariesNot once did a sexual thought enter my head despite the staffBeing not only erudite but in some cases classically proportioned The hours for…
I contain multitudes’ B.Dylan The multiverse is according to wikipedia the hypothetical collection of all possible universes, which together contain everything that exists. The Multiverse is also a good nomenclature for the state of British poetry now. It is a poetry world increasingly ring-fenced and siloed by vested interests,multiple cliques and what are basically book-reading…
So finally here it is the all new revised second edition of Thames Valley Texas published to coincide with the reading I giving at Cornerstone Arts Centre, Didcot on Friday 7th November. I will be supporting the acclaimed new country singer Hannah White and The Dreaming Spires whose new LP ‘Normal Town’ is a suite…
My hometown of Didcot, Oxon (formerly Berks) was identified as the most normal town in the U.K. according to the BBC and researchers. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-oxfordshire-39428314.amp? Which makes me a Normal Town Poet…. More to follow…
Ever felt down in the dumps? That the world not recognising your talents..that fame will always elude you? Fear not Mark Z and crew have the perfect solutionJUST ASK META!You will be surprised what comes back…. Shaun Belcher Poet? Shaun Belcher is indeed a poet, but I couldn’t find much information about him. Can you…
The Titanic of Publishing just hit the iceberg of Raynor Winn and not many will make it to the lifeboats. In recent days the media has been slowly coming to terms with a sequence of revelations of the sheer scale of the deception involved in the creation of the Raynor Winn myth (here I want…
A poet friend shared this Substack article on facebook and I think it is very good at analysing something which is going on at Poetry Review without taking sides and also from a female perspective. Horace & friends What is a poetry magazine for? Poetry Review has always been prone to appointing so-called ‘scene-changers’ but…
Cold Spell A pretend farm lies within these borders,hedges, fields and muddy tracks.One un-harvested by contract machinery,unbounded by electrified fencing. As I stand on a grass vergea mile of tarmac bubbling behind me,the horizon buckling in the heat haze,I begin to build.Wood for concrete, timber joists for steel.In my head a new farm appears.The old…
Shaun Belcher gives some excellent advice on how not to start a poetry career. July 1991I had just completed an interesting but fruitless temporary post at The Poetry Library on the South Bank through 1990 and had my poems and songs illustrated by my sadly deceased friend Laura Stenhouse at St. Martin’s College of Art…
THE GREENWASH RECYCLE Starts in a marketing agency hand-out around the milleniumSocial demarcation and quantifying statistics showed newer markets More social class segmentation and new science of social media metricsIdentified new opportunities to market directly to the A B and C groups Especially those spending more time at home, the newly affluent mothersWork from homers…